Mountain lions creep me out. Which is not to say that I’m against them. I’m all for mountain lions. I like the idea of them. I’m just not crazy about coming home late at night and finding one in the front yard. Like the other night.

My youngest son, Brent, called to give me a head’s up. “There’s a mountain lion at the house,” he reported. A big one. After he’d spotted it, the cat had run across the road setting off the security light next door. It was fast, he said, kind of like seeing a ghost.

When I mentioned the lion to my neighbor the next day she merely shrugged. “Yeah, he’s around,” she said, never missing a beat while raking pine needles. “We got a bear comes around too,” she added.

Okay. I know about the bear. Bear and I have already shared a few uncomfortable moments.

“He passes through now and then,” my neighbor said returning to the fact of the lion. “Got a den up there on Berrian Mountain. Never bothers anything.”

Travel and Fitness Editor Kyle Wagner grew up in Pittsburgh and lived in Lake County, Ill., and Naples, Fla., before moving to Denver in 1993, where she reviewed restaurants for Westword before moving to The Denver Post in 2002. She considers the best days to be those that involve her teenage daughters and doing something outside, preferably mountain biking or whitewater rafting.

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